Britain Helping Tajikistan Protect Radioactive Waste Storage

The United Kingdom has brought online Tajikistan’s first site to house radioactive material in Tajikistan. Tajikistan has massive uranium fields which were developed

The storage facility was constructed in Tajikistan’s Faizabad region, 30 miles east of the capital Dushanbe, where one of the country’s main soviet-era storage facilities for spent radioactive material is currently housed.

The project was financed by Britain’s Global Threat Reduction Program.

Britain’s ambassador to Tajikistan Trevor Moore said that GTRP initiative was a complex project and that the GTRP cooperated with both the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Tajik government in constructing the facility, which has subsequently assumed the responsibility for the protection of nuclear and radioactive material in Faizabad, Britain’s embassy in the capital Dushanbe reported.

The joint GTRP-Tajik facility is designed to house waste materials from Tajikistan’s massive uranium fields, which were developed in the Soviet period and abandoned in the wake of the 1991 collapse of the USSR. Soviet defense plants, which used the radioactive material, operated in the vicinity of Dushanbe.

Faizabad currently houses a of a uranium tailings storage facility, which stockpiles spent uranium ore and other radioactive substances, but a lack of government funding has left the site vulnerable not only to possible potential environmental leakage, but pilferage as well.